Monday, November 13, 2017

A significant and quite unpleasant part of my job is to talk to upset customers.

Today I spent well over an hour exchanging pleasantries with an eBay customer who refused to accept the fact that eBay refers to every repair service listing as an "item" and shows, without vendors being able to control that, the words "Items available" on the page.

I learned, along the way, that my use of English language is bad, that our offer is fishy and that my statements are contradicting, so beware - what I say may or may not be correct and if it sounds fishy it might indeed be!

Oddly enough, eBay sided with our version of the story this time and rejected customer's claims, so we had to take care of his issue manually after he learned from another source he was wrong...which we did, of course.

Just for the record, here's part of the exchange, before it got messy:

The reason I am making this post in the middle of a fairly busy Monday is because literally half an hour after we were done with that customer (hardly winning his heart, but being fair nonetheless and not making any money of him!) I received another feedback, from another customer and it looked like this:

Much shorter and easier to process, wasn't it?

What I find ironic is not the mere coincidence that we received condemnation and praise in one day.

That is not uncommon.

What I find ironic is that both customers have no feedback on eBay, which makes it logical that both of them are brand new there and have not had past experience dealing with eBay and repair services.

The first customer accused us in misleading him and making false representation of a repair service due to the term "Items available" placed on the page by eBay (not us!); he also accused us to be profiting from misleading people like him.

The second customer, who used practically identical repair service offer, apparently had no such issues and is now apparently happily enjoying his or her TV at a faction of the cost of a new one.

Where do you think the difference in their experiences comes from?

If it was up to you which customer would you rather be - the ones who sees problems everywhere, but not in himself or the one that reads offer descriptions and follows instructions?

It isn't black and white, I know, and I do not ask anyone to trust us blindly.

yet the public fact is that roughly 98% of our customers on eBay find us of value.